"There are countless pundits and other tech gurus describing Google Wave as a disappointment, lately. Most of that seems to come from the fact that nobody seems to get what Wave is for. So they compare it to social media. Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon."Read more here.

It is really sad to see how the tech world does not get things like Wave.

Why?

The product is simply too complicated. Blaming people like me (who see Wave as a hopelessly complicated piece of software that solves problems few people actually have) for not understanding Wave is like a pilot blaming his passengers for not knowing how to fly a 747.

well I thought the concept was simple enough (don't have an invite to Wave so I can't comment on its implementation), but I think Google deserves a lot of the blame for the confusion surrounding Wave, in their massive one hour tech demo they don't even begin to explain its inner workings till the very end and it was the smallest part of the presentation. It was mostly showing off gadgets completely unrelated to the core functionality. They were a nice way of showing that Wave is extendable and has an API to play with, but showing that stuff first really confuses things. The presentation also made no attempt to explain real world use cases, simply saying its an email replacement and letting people draw their own conclusions from that.

The final nail in the coffin of confusion is releasing the preview in the manner they did. Giving a collaboration tool to large numbers of people who have nothing to collaborate on is a recipe for confusion. Add that features that make using it as a communication tool more bearable, like draft mode or access controls, are totally absent at this point. Well its no wonder a lot of people are turned off.

Could you please explain to me what exactly do you find too complicated in Wave?
Sure it can do lots of stuff that email can't, but do you really need to know all that to have a better email-like experience?

While it's true that Wave is a great collaboration tool, all that fancy stuff is not necessary if you want to use it simply like email with nice conversation grouping - the wave. At least in my experience...

Blaming people like me (who see Wave as a hopelessly complicated piece of software that solves problems few people actually have) for not understanding Wave is like a pilot blaming his passengers for not knowing how to fly a 747.

Dude... I was able to explain to my wife how to use it via a separate IM session (ok, sorta, ultimately she told me it seemed too complicated also)

So I was looking around for people who I know on wave the other day, found a guy I hadn't spoken to in about 7 years. Pinged him, and had a bit of back and forth email type exchange. At one point I noticed him replying as I watched, so I started responding to him in real time.

GMail gave us the metaphor of email being a conversation rather then a letter. Everyone gets that pretty quickly. Wave just takes that to the next level, with some wiki-esque features thrown in. People may not get it after watching the video, but they will within a day of using the service.

Give someone a Wave account, and tell him, that this is his new email.

If this person knows how to use email, he will start by "sending a wave", discovering that he cannot actually "send" it, ask for help, and get the reply that he already sent it.

After that he will just work with it like with email, and discover additional use cases as he goes.
I have no idea, why you think it is too complicated. Quite the reverse, it is easy to begin with, and gets more complex the more advanced features you want to use. But the features are optional, one can get started without knowing the whole lot about it.

Oh the company I work for actually does the basic document sharing through Docs, which at this point is quite limited in realtime editing (it tends to put edited bits back when several people have simultaneously worked inside a doc). We are well aware that Google may have access to the contents but we have nothing to hide.

We are still dependent on Skype to do the international communication, and are actually looking forward to working with Waves. Perhaps one day we'll get Google Voice too (mainly Europe-based).